The present invention relates to the shoe manufacturing industry and, more specifically, to items for a shoe sole that provide greater safety and comfort to such shoes due to their adherence and shock-absorbing effect.
Many systems are already known to produce shoe soles with anti-slipping characteristics. However, most of them are addressed to the professional or sports sectors which require shoes with a high degree of adherence, such as fishers, climbers, etc. Specifically, document ES-U 1000599 should be mentioned which describes a sole for sports footwear that presents in its front part a series of concave hollow areas that act as a suction pad. This suction pad effect is also reflected in document ES-U 246026 which describes an improved sole for sports footwear with a concave central area that acts as a suction pad. This suction pad effect is also described in document ES-U 246522. However and despite the fact that the suction pad effect undoubtedly provides adherence to the floor, presents a critical problem not solved yet and related to the loss of efficiency when the surface on which the user walks presents an accumulation of water as a result of the impossibility of evacuating the water stored underneath the suction pad.
Similarly, footwear able to be used under extreme circumstances of water and ice is already known. Such footwear incorporates many methods to deploy and hide the nails as reflected in European Patent 1096867 A which, under the name anti-slipping shoe sole, presents a system to deploy supports inserted in slots or cavities of the shoe sole which incorporates nails and a method to hide them.
Furthermore, there is a trend in several prior inventions to combine materials ordinarily used to manufacture shoe soles with others that incorporate metallic characteristics in order that these latter ones adhere the soles to the floor as reflected in documents ES-U 1034817 and ES-U 139937.
The prior art mentioned above does not foresee, since it only relates to extreme or professional conditions, the existence of a system that thanks to an easy manufacturing and incorporation to all kind of footwear, as in the case of the object of this invention, provides a sole with adherence conditions unknown up to now by the public in general and that solves to a large extent the uncomfortable and dangerous slips in the case of polished surfaces, especially when there is an accumulation of water.
The invention also intends to provide a shock-absorbing effect combined with the above that enhances the comfort of the shoe. In this respect, different devices are known to provide specifically to soles and in general to footwear optimum comfort conditions. However, and as in the previous case, they are confined to a specific sector, in this case sports footwear. Such shock-absorbing systems, such as the one described in document ES-P 2085206 A, are normally bellows studs with a size not advisable for daily-use footwear, both for aesthetic and functional reasons, but that are very useful and appropriate for sports footwear but not for a daily use. Document ES-U 1043453 describes a shock-absorbing system consisting of integral shock-absorbing protuberances that, through complicated successive concentric sections provides a certain shock-absorbing effect.
However, none of the documents belonging to the current state of the art allow to combine both the shock-absorbing and the adherence effects.
Therefore, this invention tries to solve the stiffness and adherence problems of conventional non-sports or professional shoe soles, providing a footwear with optimum shock-absorbing and adherence conditions by means of a system of grooves, concavities and projections of a small size and which can be manufactured in an easy and affordable way.